breath, then set him the obvious question:

"Did you not consider it--did you not weigh these chances--before you
embarked upon this business, before you, yourself, urged me to this
step?"

"Aye, did I," he answered sullenly.

"Then, why these complaints now?"

He was singularly, madly frank with her in his reply. He told her that
he had done it because he loved her, because she had given him signs
that his love was not in vain.

"I gave you signs?" she interrupted him. "Mother in Heaven! Recite these
signs that I may know them."

"Were you not ever kind to me?" he demanded. "Did you not ever manifest
a liking for my company? Were you not ever pleased that I should sing
to you the songs that in your honour I had made? Was it not to me you
turned in the hour of your need?"

"See now how poor a thing you are, Gonzaga?" she answered witheringly.
"A woman may not smile on you, may not give you a kind word, may not
suffer you to sing to her, but you must conclude she is enamoured of
you. And if I turned to you in my hour of need, as you remind me, needs
that be a sign of my infatuation? Does every cavalier so think when
a helpless woman turns to him in her distress? But even so," she
continued, "how should all that diminish the peril you now talk of?
Even were your suit with me to prosper, would that make you any the less
Romeo Gonzaga, the butt of the anger of my uncle and Gian Maria? Rather
do I think that it should make you more."

But he disillusioned her. He did not scruple, in his angry mood, to lay
before her his reasonings that as her husband he would be screened.

She laughed aloud at that.

"And so it is by such sophistries as these that your presumption came to
life?"

That stung him. Quivering with the passion that obsessed him, he stepped
close up to her.

"Tell me, Madonna--why shall we account presumption in Romeo Gonzaga a
suit that in a nameless adventurer we encourage?" he asked, his voice
thick and tremulous.

"Have a care," she bade him.

"A care of what?" he flashed back. "Answer me, Monna Valentina. Am I
so base a man that by the very thought of love for you I must presume,
whilst you can give yourself into the arms of this swashbuckling bravo,
and take his kisses? Your reasoning sorts ill with your deeds."

"Craven!" she answered him. "Dog that you are!" And before the blaze of
passion in her eyes he recoiled, his courage faltering. She cropped her
anger in mid-career, and in a dang